Episode 210 – Seedborn Musings

On this episode we’re missing Brian, who had a last-minute before-Christmas dinner thing. So We’re joined by Brandon Isleib, better known as the Seedborn Muse over on the Muse Vessel! Of course, you’ll be able to find him over on Gathering Magic on Tuesdays from now on, so maybe you should check that out too. But since we had a guest host, we decided to make a potpourri episode of random smaller topics that have come up recently.

First off there’s a quick discussion of the two cards Banned from Modern. Then we took a quick look at Avacyn Restored. We let Brandon cut loose on a topic we recently we recently talked about, keeping casual Magic casual. Then there was a discussion of creatures with Defender in multiplayer Magic. We finished up with a nice long discussion about the various mechanics in Future Sight and which of them were our favorites. That one was a good one.

Big thanks to Brandon for joining us, we had a lot of fun with him! You guys should definitely go check out his Musings, along with the other two guys over on The Muse Vessel!

5 Comments

In modern, after the banning of Nacatl, Punishing Fire/Grove shuts down every other aggro deck by itself. Any aggro deck relying on creatures with 2 or less toughness (ie: all of them once Nacatl is gone) can’t beat Fire/Grove. Also, aggro decks have very tight decklists without much room for reactive cards or lands that can’t cast their early creatures, so graveyard hate/ghost quarter is not really an option. They need to have their colors early and they need every card to be proactive. Control decks can deal with Fire/Grove easily enough and that was never an issue, the problem is that aggro decks can’t afford to give up their consistency to play cards that stop the combo and also hope to have enough gas to win. Using a Ghost Quarter or drawing a Nihil Spellbomb could mean not being able to activate Grim Lavamancer once or not having the burn spell/creature you need to win the game, and thats important.

Sorry for the wall of text, just wanted to explain the P. Fire banning as I see it.

If a list is so tight that it’s impossible to make any changes without destroying its consistency, that implies it’s impossible to effectively sideboard against anything, which obviously isn’t true. It’s very easy to be ready to respond to a graveyard-dependent strategy in Modern.

The problem is that Fire/Grove isn’t a graveyard dependent strategy, it’s a 2 card combo that can go in almost any deck. A Tormod’s Crypt can shut down dredge or reanimator by removing the entire avenue for their deck’s success. Against this combo it only removes one half of the combo, of which the opponent likely has 3 more copies in their deck, and that isn’t really enough. I understand the questioning of the banning as it doesn’t exactly seem like the strongest and most durable combo in the world, but if it was as easy as you are suggesting to hate out the combo, someone would have found it over the last few months of playing modern online/on the pro tour level.

If there’s been a sufficient amount of innovation and forward-thinking going on at those levels over the past few months, then yes, something should have been discovered. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult to quantify.